KOREA: Yahoo Korea sees comeback chance with new services

Yahoo Korea's new managing director plans to rescue the search engine from recent scandal with a new video sharing service

The Korea Times
Thursday, May 31, 2007

By Cho Jin-seo

The past decade has been a continuous decline for Yahoo Korea, but the Internet's aging giant hopes it can still beat strong competitors like Naver and Google and take back its old glory.

James Kim, the new managing director of its Korean operation, says that he is the man capable of the job and Yahoo's rich global assets will help him write a comeback story.

"I deem myself as a turnaround specialist. I have 23 years work experience of which the big bulk has been turning around the businesses," the Korean-American director said during a press conference at Seoul Digital Forum, Thursday.

"I'm committed to Korea, and we are going to fix Yahoo Korea, and we are going to win Korea," he said.

Kim was brought in by Jerry Yang, Yahoo's co-founder, in February, to rescue the ailing Korean portal and search businesses. As a managing director, he overseas both Yahoo's portal site and Overture Internet advertising service, while seven-year Yahoo Korea veteran Kim Jin-soo is acting as the CEO of Yahoo Korea.

Yahoo once was the largest and most popular portal site in South Korea in the late 1990s. But failing to deliver fancy items, it has gradually lost the popularity in competitions against locally grown services such as Naver, Nate and Daum. Now it is in the distant fourth-place in terms of the number of daily visitors.

The latest blow to Yahoo's reputation took place in March. A short porn clip was posted on its video sharing service and was viewed by some 20,000 people in six hours until it was finally noticed and removed by the monitors. Though this was not a rare case among Korean portals as well, much of the criticism from the media was poured on Yahoo. The video sharing service, called Yammy, was closed in the wake of the scandal.

Kim Jin-soo, the CEO, said that he doesn't want to risk further backlash by opening it again. Instead, he is considering bringing in Yahoo's other popular services to Korea, such as Yahoo Flickr, a global photo sharing and community site, and My Yahoo, a personalized Internet desktop service, to distinguish itself from locally grown sites and "give a reason to Internet users to visit our site."

Regarding Google's recent expansion plans in the Korean market, James Kim said that the two firms are walking different paths in and outside of Korea and will not interfere each other very much.

"I have a lot of friends in Google. Many of them are my classmates and I talk to them all the time. I think it's a great company. But I think we are unique that our mission statement is to connect people to their communities to the world's knowledge, whereas Google is a company really focused on search," he said.

Date Posted: 5/31/2007